Last week the Brookings Mountain West released a noteworthy report on the potential of the Intermountain West to help reinvent America’s fossil-fuel dependent energy system and so construct the “next economy” in the Mountain region and nationally.  The full study can be found HERE.

By Ann Rascalli

The Brookings report encourages the U.S. to move proactively and aggressively to build the proposed Intermountain West network of high-powered energy innovation commercialization centers. 

Through such an intervention, the federal government could catalyze a dynamic new partnership of Mountain West businesses, research universities, federal laboratories, entrepreneurs, and state and local government to transform the nation’s carbon-dependent economy. Along the way, the nation could experiment with a dynamic new approach to leveraging for the nation’s benefit a powerful regional innovation complex while helping to empower the Intermountain West to reach its potential for prominence in a ‘next economy’ that will be opportunity-rich as well as export-oriented, lower-carbon, and innovation fueled.

The study suggests that the region’s assets, a series of four to six of these translational energy research centers, each focused on a different theme, could reasonably be located throughout the Intermountain West with total annual federal funding between $1 billion and $2 billion.

For example, a solar energy hub might be located in Southern Nevada and Arizona that brings together the Universities of Arizona and Nevada and Arizona State University, national labs like NREL and Sandia, and companies such as NV Energy and Acciona. Or a Colorado-New Mexico partnership might host a center focused on smart grid integration that involves the universities of Colorado and New Mexico, Colorado State University, and the private sector work at Lucent, Cisco, and Lockheed Martin. And, certainly many other plausible consortiums focused on different energy topics and drawing in various regional partners could take shape through the Mountain West.

The scenario would work like this — each regional center would be selected through a competitive federal award process that would not only evaluate the scientific merit of the proposal but also the commitment of various partners; plans for management and financial stability; strategies for technology transfer and commercialization; and approaches for connecting to surrounding regional industry clusters and the regional and national center network.

The Brookings study pointed out that the region is already home to more than a dozen stellar research universities; four national energy labs, including the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL) that does cutting-edge work on renewables; an abundance of renewable energy potential in solar, wind, and geothermal; and unparalleled opportunities to build new infrastructure, like smart grids and energy efficient buildings, from the ground-up.

The scenario outlined in the study is an entirely plausible policy goal that could dramatically benefit our region and the nation’s energy future if achieved, including accelerated job growth in clean energy. Given the current state of politics however, including the inability to pass a national renewable energy standard and the always present regional turf battles, it is one that would face significant obstacles.